Troels Brødsgaard

Uptime

Building communication platforms for the IoT

In the EcoGrid 2.0 project, we're researching how to optimize power consumption to enable integration of more renewable energy in the electricity grid. We remotely control a thousand heat pumps and electric heating panels, using different kinds of off-the-shelf home energy management systems. We're hoping to demonstrate that large-scale optimization of consumption is feasible and beneficial for both consumers, producers and the grid.

To enable centralized control of different kinds of home energy management systems, we've built an interoperability platform to facilitate communication. The platform leverages Elixir and OTP to provide fault tolerant and soft real-time translation between the different device protocols. In this talk we will explore how the platform is designed, how we implemented it and how we deploy and monitor it - and we will share our tips on debugging Elixir applications in production. Attendees should leave the talk with a more practical understanding on how to build and run awesome systems with Elixir and OTP.

Troels was struck by Elixir in 2015 while studying computer science. Here he used Elixir and Phoenix to build a scalable, storage-backed pub-sub system for sensor data, which opened his eyes to the potential of the BEAM. He has since been obsessed with the idea of building truly interactive systems, where human operators can interact with all the individual workers who carry out the work of the system. Today he works as a polyglot programmer at a small software development and consulting firm. He and his team designs and builds innovative solutions to practical problems for both small companies and large research institutions.